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Archive for March, 2006

I’m delighted to have accepted an invitation to be a presenter at this year’s Surrey International Writers’ Conference, being held just outside Vancouver, British Columbia, October 19-22. Also on the program: Donald Maass, who is one of the top agents in the science-fiction field. The page about me at the Surrey website.

(UPDATED: Thanks to my friend H. Don Wilkat for reprocessing the videos into smaller files.) For those of you with entirely too much bandwidth on your hands, Marcel Gagne has provided me with two video recordings from the most recent open fandom party we held at Carolyn and my place, on Saturday, January 14, 2006. […]

In addition to the other formats I’ve previously had my current Hugo and Nebula Award finalist “Identity Theft” available in, I’ve now added it as a plain, ordinary HTML web page, for those who like to read in a web browser: http://www.sfwriter.com/identity.htm All the available formats can be accessed here: http://www.sfwriter.com/it.htm

Stanley Schmidt at Analog Science Fiction and Fact has bought serialization rights to Robert J. Sawyer‘s seventeenth novel, Rollback. Analog will run the book’s full text in four installments, in its October, November, and December 2006 issues, and its January-February 2007 double issue. The first installment will be on sale August 1, 2006. “I’m thrilled […]

I’ll be out most of tomorrow, so I’m posting this a bit early … I edit Robert J. Sawyer Books, which is one of Canada’s handful of small-press SF imprints. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with some of the other ones over the years. Back in 1997, Carolyn and I edited Tesseracts 6 […]

Sometimes you just need to get away from the ringing phones and all that jazz … Carolyn and I hopped in the car on Tuesday morning and went down to my dad’s vacation home on beautiful Lake Canandaigua, one of the Finger Lakes in Western New York, for some peace and quiet. The place is […]

Encyclopaedia Britannica has issued a lengthy — and fascinating — rebuttal to the report in Nature magazine that said that Britannica was not significantly better than Wikipedia. “Nature’s research was invalid. As we demonstrate below, almost everything about the journal’s investigation, from the criteria for identifying inaccuracies to the discrepancy between the article text and […]

This is my tenth Hugo nomination; my third nomination since winning the best-novel Hugo in 2003 for HOMINIDS (subsequent ones were for the novel HUMANS, the short story “Shed Skin,” and now for “Identity Theft”); my third nomination for short fiction (previous ones were for the short stories “The Hand You’re Dealt” from the anthology […]

I’m delighted to announce that my “Identity Theft” is a Hugo finalist in addition to being a Nebula finalist. Woohoo! The full list of Hugo finalists is on the Locus Online website. You can read “Identity Theft” free online through Fictionwise or on my website (the versions on my website are printable). See this entry […]

There are lots of programs for the PC, the Palm, and other platforms that make use of Princeton’s WordNet database, turning it into a dictionary (which isn’t what it was meant to be, but still …). Of all the Windows ones, I like WordWeb best — and it’s free. It lives in my system tray, […]

As part of its promotion of Nebula Awards nominees, my novella “Identity Theft” is now available as a free ebook in all standard ebook formats from Fictionwise.com: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook37235.htm For the current week, I’m featured right on the Fictionwise main page: fictionwise.com And if you prefer other formats, the full text of “Identity Theft” is available […]

Time for another Monday Spotlight, pointing out one of the 500+ documents on my web site at sfwriter.com. I often get writers asking me very basic questions via email, and so I’ve put together a canned response. If you’re a wannabe writer, you might find my Letter to Beginning Writers useful. Best of luck!

Holy Moses! My news group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/robertjsawyer passed the 25,000-message mark yesterday! The group was founded in May 2001, and now has over a thousand members. Come have a look!

You don’t often see soliloquies in movies, and everyone says you shouldn’t have them in books, either. But I like them — Antony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar is one of my favorite bits of theater. Well, here’s a nice long soliloquy from an SF film: 621 words spoken uninterrupted by Hal Holbrook as the […]

Tanya Huff is one of my oldest and dearest friends — we first met when were both students at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto in 1979. So I am just so totally tickled pink that Canada’s Space: The Imagination Station has ordered 22 hour-long episodes of a TV series based on Tanya’s popular Blood books. […]

Join us for the launch of A Small and Remarkable Life, the first novel by Hugo and World Fantasy Award finalist Nick DiChario, at Ad Astra, Toronto’s annual science-fiction convention, Friday, March 31, at 8:00 p.m. in the Reflections Room of the Crowne Plaza Toronto Don Valley Hotel, 1250 Eglinton Avenue East. We’ll also be […]

… at least according to Google. To my astonishment, I discovered by accident today that if you search on “sawyer” at Google.com, I’m the first hit. Take that, Diane Sawyer! Bite me, Tom Sawyer! In your face, Sawyer Brown! :)

Those Neanderthals just keep rollin’ along. Hominids was number nine on the Fiction bestsellers list published in The Edmonton Journal last weekend; The Journal is the major paper in the capital city of Alberta, Canada. Not bad for a book that’s coming up on four years old! Fiction 1. (2) Saturday — Ian McEwan 2. […]

Headline: Robert J. Sawyer science-fiction novel nominated for Ontario Library Association Award The Ontario Library Association has unveiled the ten-book shortlist for its second annual readers’-choice Evergreen Award. On the list: the science-fiction novel Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer. The shortlist was compiled from titles nominated by librarians. Readers will vote for their favorite book […]

I did a via-email interview today for the newsletter of the Canadian Authors Association on the topic of author web sites: Robert J. Sawyer of Mississauga, Ontario, is one of only sixteen writers in history to win the science-fiction field’s top two awards: the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the Year (which he won […]

There’s a discussion going on right now in my Yahoo! Groups newsgroup about outlining novels — and so I thought it would be approprirate for today’s Monday Spotlight to highlight the outline from which the entire “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy (Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids) sold to Tor. It was quite a short outline to sell three […]

When people in the Greater Toronto Area ask me where I live, I tell them, “Just north of Square One” — which is a shopping mall in Mississauga, the 650,000-person city adjacent to Toronto that I live in (Pearson International Airport is actually in Mississauga, not Toronto). Here are ten facts about Square One: 1. […]

The table of contents for Boarding the Enterprise: Transporters, Tribbles and the Vulcan Death Grip in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek edited by David Gerrold and Robert J. Sawyer, coming in August 2006 from BenBella Books: IntroductionWelcome Aboard the EnterpriseRobert J. Sawyer ForewordThe Trouble With TrekDavid Gerrold Star Trek in the Real WorldNorman Spinrad I Remember […]